MS Responded to Yesterday's Post with Another Work-Around

The MS ASP.NET team has apparently heard some of our pain with web projects no longer having project files in VS 2005 and created another work-around since my last post:
Closed by Microsoft on 2005-08-10 at 11:42:12
   
Here is an update on this bug. Based on user feedback, we made a post-beta2 change to allow file-based assembly references to be updated. In VS03, this is equivalent to setting the CopyLocal flag to true and saving the flag and path information in the project file. In VS05, we do not have a project file, so this information is saved into a new type of file called a Refresh file, located in the Bin folder along with the copied assembly. When the compiler sees this file, it will get the path and check to see if a newer copy of the file-based assembly is available and will copy it to the Bin folder if it is found.

For example, if you have a file-based assembly reference to

c:\libs\foo.dll

then your web app will contain

c:\webapp1\bin\foo.dll
c:\webapp1\bin\foo.dll.refresh

I have changed FDBK27472, which was originally postponed, to reflect this new change. Thank you again for your input -- as you can see it makes a difference!

-- The Web Platform & Tools Team
Thanks to Andy Miller for pointing this out.  I wouldn't exactly call this the "right" solution (that would be giving us at least an option to have a project file), but they are listening.

1 Comment

  • Boy, that sure looks a bit kludgey!



    Mewonders if they actually changed the COMPILER to do this... Being an ol' compiler hacker, I get to say: EEEeeewwww!



    It would have been easier to implement this as a post-build rule. Maybe that's what they really meant. (But then...wouldn't that require a project file to store such a post-build rule?)



    Regardless, this might be workable. The only side-effect is that any other tools that have to look at the target folder (that contains these new .refresh files) will now have to ignore them in some instances.



    And here I thought they had sorta promised to restore the project file in whole, not just partial-functionally. Guess they're going to kludge the tools for the advanced and enterprise developers and instead favor the beginners... Sad! (They claim to be listening, but are losing parts of the message during translation by some program manager or project manager. I'm sure they'll rationalize this "do it right the third time" development technique as "lack of resources"...calling their software developers "resources" once again.)

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